


Run

by Xairathan



Category: Yozakura Quartet
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 18:16:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17146667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xairathan/pseuds/Xairathan
Summary: The town they knew is too changed to recognize (and maybe better without them)





	Run

They meet at night at the foot of the Nanagou where Gin had been sent to the other world. Gin finds Enjin standing at the edge of the circle of dead earth where the trunk had been. His hood, slanted up at the half-moon hovering above, shifts towards the sound of approaching footsteps.

“You’re up again,” Enjin laughs. His voice is hoarse again. It speaks to the nightmares that keep him awake, walking the city like a restless spirit that no Hiizumi will ever be able to calm. “We keep meeting here.”

“I suppose it’s an important place to both of us.”

Gin draws even with him, stands shoulder to shoulder. The body the gods gave Enjin is the same as Gin’s, except for the glasses. He’d said it was familiar, made him feel better than getting a body that looked like a Hiizumi’s. He’s got the ears, too, even though he can’t use them, and Gin watches them twitch anxiously beneath his hood.

“You got sent to hell here,” rasps Enjin. “And I got introduced to you here on the other side.”

“Something like that.”

Enjin tears his gaze from the moon, eyes red around the rims. “Why do I stay here?” he asks. “There’s nothing here for me. Just people I’ve hurt and some bad memories.” He lifts a hand to head off anything Gin might try and say. “Don’t start with me about them needing time to get used to me. I know they won’t. You should know, too.”

Gin lowers his head, and his silence speaks to how right Enjin is.

“I guess…” Enjin hisses a breath into the air. It catches the lift of a warming breeze and vanishes amidst the rustling leaves around them, growing green and full with the coming spring. “I’m here because you still are.”

He faces Gin fully, surveying him over the rims of his glasses. Gin knows he only does this when he’s earnest, and trying to be honest about it.

“Don’t tell me you don’t feel it too, like you don’t belong here. Like you can be sitting with everyone and still feel somewhere else. If that wasn’t true, you wouldn’t be awake like this, and you wouldn’t be out here alone.”

Enjin turns his back to the moon, takes another step closer. The light from the moon is gone from his eyes, dark crimson circles that tell of grief and fatigue.

“This town’s not good for you, Gin. Even I can see that.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s been good for you, either,” Gin replies.

“Then let’s go.” Enjin shifts his weight, tilts his head forward. The peak of his hood brushes the hair of Gin’s forehead. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where would we go?”

“Somewhere else that isn’t here. Come on, Nanami.”

“And everyone else?”

Enjin hesitates, breathing shallowly. When he moves, it’s to wrap his arms around Gin, fingers cradling his shoulders, the way he tells Gin that their discussions are over, that all that can be done has been.

“It wouldn’t be like before. They’d be able to talk to you if you wanted. They’d know you’d come home.”

Enjin’s sigh passes by his ear, warm and fragile. “Just think about it, Gin. For both of us.”

Something in Gin’s chest settles, that worried part of him that had always feared waking up one day and finding Enjin gone with no trace, no clue left behind to lead to him. Enjin disengages from him with a careful trace of his fingers along Gin’s jaw, heading back towards town.

Gin listens to him go, Enjin’s last words hanging in his mind, a weighty spectre.

The sunrise finds him still at the edge of town, back turned to it and the skyline of Sakura Shinmachi, mangled in his memory by the jut of buildings that tear wider the gap that four years has left on his soul.

* * *

When he does get some sleep, sometimes Gin dreams of things he knows didn’t happen. He knows he’s never had Enjin cradled against him, horribly still, while the newest god laughs from his throne. He knows he has never run his hands along Enjin’s neck, praying for a pulse, or felt warm blood grow cold under his fingers.

That image chases Gin even through his waking, sinister and cold despite the blankets Gin’s wrapped himself with. It takes him a minute to come to his senses, and another to recognize the pounding noise he hears is someone at his door, not his heart.

“Open up! Gin!” Enjin shouts from outside. Gin hears him moving around the front of the apartment, a shadow passing briefly over the window. It keeps coming and going, and with it echoes the sound of Enjin’s pacing, rushed and inconsistent.

“I’m fine,” Gin mumbles, reaching the door. It’s barely half open when Enjin pushes his way through the crack, clawing his way in one arm over the other to fling both around Gin’s neck. “Hey-!”

“What was that about?” hisses Enjin. “You called for me, and then you didn’t answer your door!” His hands make fists in the fabric of Gin’s jacket, shaking him. “What was I supposed to do with that? I thought you’d left without me, or something happened!”

“I…” Gin’s reply doesn’t come, not under the frantic intensity of Enjin’s stare. He takes in the sweat beaded on Enjin’s brow and the hair stuck to his skin, the tight clenching of his jaw that loosens with every passing second. “I didn’t mean to. I was asleep.”

“Another nightmare.”

Enjin doesn’t need Gin to say anything more. He shifts his stance, shutting the door behind them, and lets them both sink down until their knees rest against cold tile.

“Do you want to tell me what it was?”

Gin bows his head, hiding it against the crook of Enjin’s neck. “Okay,” Enjin says, the only thing he needs to say, or can say. He rests his back against the door, holding Gin, the throbbing ache in his chest growing stronger with each of Gin’s little gasps that leaves the solitude of his coat.

He tries not to think of what Gin must be crying for. They’ve already cried for so many of the same things; for the unfamiliar town they’ve come home to, for the unmatched scars they carry; for unbridgeable distances. He tries not to cry for the same things as Gin, because really, he never volunteered to save this town, or dreamed of coming back home.

He cries for Gin instead. He cries into the shoulder of Gin’s coat the things he’ll never say aloud: that he’s thankful that Gin carried him for so long, that even after separating he’d still cared for Enjin.

They lay on the tile for a long while, unnoticed by the moving of the world around them, breathing in the silences and the warmth of the other’s company.

Gin is the one to break their fragile balance, laying his cheek flat on Enjin’s shoulder and gazing into his eyes. “You’re right,” he whispers with a weighty sense of finality. Enjin tilts his head, confused, and through the tears the red of his eyes could almost be mistaken for blood. Gin goes to blink them away, but the weight of Enjin’s hand settles on his cheek, fingers brushing at them.

“You don’t have to say that just because I-”

“I mean it. You were right.” Gin’s voice is low, almost defeated. “About everything.”

“I wasn’t thinking when- I was being selfish that night, okay?” Enjin says, hurrying over each word. This is the only city Gin would know, and to ask him to leave would be a mistake. “I didn’t mean it.”

“You were crying, too. Just now.” Gin’s ears lean forward slightly, and his next word catches Enjin off guard. “Why?”

“I…” Enjin struggles to speak, to breathe. Before he can think of a way to react, his face morphs into a casual smirk, so out of place, and he says, “You’re a Satori. Don’t you know?”

“I guess I do.” Gin draws a long breath, smiling as he releases it. “I guess I always did.”

Of course he would know. They’d been in each other’s minds for so long, and sometimes Enjin wonders if, Satori or not, they don’t still have something linking them together.

“The night before the cherry blossom festival,” Gin whispers. “When everyone’s out getting ready. That’s when we’ll go.”

“You don’t have to do this.” Enjin wants to take it all back- their talk the other night, what Gin’s said. He wants to believe it all a dream, but the faint glimpse of happiness on Gin’s face stops him from saying he doesn’t want to go, and Gin shouldn’t, either.

He moves closer, leaning against Gin and supporting his weight, what he’s always done to tell Gin that he’s here, that they’re both here.

A hand covers his in reply, and this time, he knows this isn’t a dream. 

* * *

Enjin comes over on the night they’re supposed to leave, a backpack slung over his shoulders and digging lines into his coat.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks as Gin tidies up, checking their final preparations. A note for the others, two bags for himself, several maps that he’s picked up or printed out.

“You’re gonna say it’s not too late to back out, aren’t you?” Gin laughs shakily, hesitating with his hands clenched around a white envelope with Ao’s name written on it. “That’s not really true, though.”

“If that’s the case, then I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

“You didn’t do that. I chose this.” Gin looks at Enjin, eyes growing still as their gazes meet, a smile spreading across Gin’s face in the quiet. Enjin huffs and starts to pace by the door, brimming with nervous energy.

“Quit doing that, Nanami,” he snaps. “That grinning thing.”

“If you’re traveling with me, you’ll have to get used to it.”

“It’s not too late for me to take off on my own and ditch you.”

“It is.” Gin closes the distance between them so quickly it’s as if he’d known what Enjin was thinking. It has always been too late, from the moment awoke in him with a resigned _Let’s go_ , and he, left with no one and nothing to guide him, had listened. “Even if you did do it, you’d always come back and find me again.”

Gin’s hand winds against his jacket, right over his heart. He’s right, Enjin thinks. He’s right, and not because he’s a Satori; Gin would be the only person in Sakura Shinmachi who could understand him, and the only person in the world whose lips he can speak the truth against, and receive wordless replies from them in turn.

In the timeless entryway where Gin had left five years earlier, they are briefly one again. The breath that Gin takes is the one that leaves Enjin, restless and harsh. The hard beating of his heart is mirrored in the rise of Gin’s neck and the movement of his ears, darting constantly towards the heart of town.

“We’re going, then,” Enjin says. His cheeks are flushed, as much from the night cold he’d come into escape as from excitement.

Gin’s hand winds down his jacket, finding his.

They don’t look at each other as they leave the apartment, heading away from the trails of paper lantern lights, draped overhead along with echoed laughter. Gin keeps their presence hidden, not that there’s much to mask. They’re quiet, two wandering ghosts letting the town pass them by, their only proof of life the beating of their hearts through their interconnected hands.

Enjin’s steps slow by the border of town, a thin white line painted on graying concrete. Gin stops with him, still not looking back, still silent. He sees in the sidewalk the town that he has always known, its streets that he grew with, now grown without him. He sees the halo ringed around Enjin’s feet, still hesitating.

_Am I going to be worth it,_ Enjin wants to say, if only to draw a response. _Is this really what you want?_

“I didn’t think you’d be the one to hesitate,” Gin says, laughing softly. His shoes toe the edge of the line, unafraid of the plunge beyond. It’s his way of saying he’s done this before, that he’d made his choice long ago. “I told you I wouldn’t let you go alone.”

He can still feel the steady pulse of Gin’s heart through his hand, measured, the one thing in the world he knows he can trust. The hearts of Satori are open to each other, and they had both been Satori, once.

Enjin leans forward, lets himself fall into Gin’s arms.

Their feet shuffle against the sidewalk, displacing the fallen cherry blossoms that have gathered there, their shadowy anchors vanishing under the golden spotlights of unfamiliar street lamps.


End file.
